Accountability and Reporting

Our national office is located in Canberra and we have State offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The Ombudsman and Deputy Ombudsman are based in Canberra along with five Senior Assistant Ombudsman, who manage the specialist complaint handling teams.

The Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman's ABN number is: 53003678148.

Administrative files

On 14 November 1994 the Senate agreed to a motion by Senator Harradine requiring all Australian Government departments and agencies to produce an indexed list of files every six months for tabling before Parliament. The production of the list is intended to make the operations of government more transparent to the Australian public.

As part of the Governments' ongoing commitment to give Australians greater access to relevant government information quickly and easily, the original Senate Order was amended in 1998 and now requires departments to also list these files on their Internet websites.

Legal services expenditure

Under Paragraph 11.1(ba) of the Legal Services Directions 2017, the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman is obliged to make publicly available its legal services expenditure for the previous financial year.

This is a statement of legal services expenditure published in accordance with paragraph 11.1(ba) of the Legal Services Directions 2017.

Expenditure 2015-16

Amount ($)

External (ex GST)

71,525.40

Internal (ex GST)

122,508.59

Total

194,033.99

Senate Order on government agency contracts

Pursuant to the Senate Order on non-corporate Commonwealth entity contracts, agency contracts entered into by the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, which provide for a consideration to the value of $100,000 or more and which:

have not been fully performed as at 30 June 2016 or

which have been entered into during the 12 months prior to 30 June 2016.

All contracts required to be listed pursuant to the Senate Order can be found on the AusTender website. The report is titled Senate Order on Confidentiality in Procurement Contracts by Agency.

Some of the contracts listed contain confidentiality provisions of a general nature that are designed to protect the confidential information of the parties that may be obtained or generated in carrying out the contract.

The reasons for including such clauses include:

ordinary commercial prudence that requires protection of trade secrets, proprietary information and the like

protection of Commonwealth material and personal information.

The Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman has estimated its cost of complying with the Senate Order is $600. This is determined by calculating the time taken to collect, analyse and compile the information and applying salary costs and on-costs.